GOP crackup? Not likely

If you have access to a computer, and you plug in the words “Republican,” “divided” or “dead” into your preferred search engine, you are likely to turn up dozens of recent articles proclaiming the death of the Republican Party. They range from the conservative Kathleen Parker to liberals like Stanley Greenberg.

These musings on the fate of the GOP have come into sharp relief in the weeks since the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.The Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the U.S. House stripped far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of her committee assignments. And starting on February 8, former president Donald Trump will face his second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

In both the cases of Greene and Trump, the leading Republican in the Congress, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appeared to side with the GOP’s critics. McConnell issued statements denouncing Greene’s views as “loony” and a “cancer” on the Republican Party. And to date, he has said (however disingenuously) that he is open to convicting Trump for his incitement to the January 6 riot.

In and of themselves, the January 6 events were shocking and norm-breaking. But in the historical arc of the U.S., they were hardly unprecedented. From the founding of the country in its conquest of Indigenous land and chattel slavery, violence has been its constant undercurrent. The U.S. fought a civil war that killed 2 percent of its population. White supremacists fueled the violent overthrow of multiple democratically elected governments throughout the 19^th century Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods.

For the pundits and the liberal media, these maneuverings at the top of the GOP are supposed to represent the beginnings of a terminal crisis in the Republican Party. Perhaps more substantial evidence for this lies in the disaffiliation of thousands of Republican voters from the party, or in the well-publicized decisions of leading business organizations to cut off contributions to Republican politicians who supported Trump’s lie that he really won the 2020 election.

But let’s put these claims in perspective.

First, it’s something of a penchant for pundits to make sweeping historical claims based on pretty limited, and ahistorical, arguments. We have only to recall that leading liberals, writing after George W. Bushwon a number of Democratic votes for his 2001 agenda, likened the Democratic Party to a “dead parrot” from an old Monty Python sketch.Five years later, the Democrats won the Congress, and seven years later they scored a “trifecta”—dominance of the executive and legislative branches with Barack Obama’s win.

On the other side, the Republican Party that lost in a near-landslide in 2008 came back with a landslide in the U.S. House of its own in 2010. For much of the rest of Obama’s first term, and for most of his second term, a right-wing agenda in the U.S. Congress—to which Obama accommodated—set the pace for U.S. government policy.

So while the current 100-years’ crisis facing the U.S. can alter these electoral cycles, it certainly won’t do away with them as long as the U.S. political system remains the province of two capitalist parties oscillating within an overwhelming pro-capitalist consensus.

Second, the Republicans remain out of power in Washington by the barest of margins. They only lost the Senate (by one tie-breaking vote) in January with the unexpected Democratic senate victories in the Georgia runoff. Beyond that, they sliced the Democratic majority in the House from 235 votes to 221 votes (three more than needed for a majority), winning all November races that the political handicapper Cook Political Report deemed to be tossups. And they maintained or strengthened their grip in state houses across the country, even in states where Democrats had been predicted to do well. And finally, Trump pulled in 74 million votes (about 47 percent of all votes cast) including making inroads into pockets of voters of color from South Texas to the Bronx. All of that is pretty impressive for a party that is supposed to be on its last legs.

Third, it’s too soon to tell if the early indicators of substantial shifts in the voting or financial base of the Republicans will amount to anything in the long term. The disaffiliation from the GOP of tens of thousands of voters is a drop in the ocean of tens of millions of Republican votes in November. And the idea that major American corporations have suddenly become champions of democracy is laughable.

The U.S. ruling class does not want to overturn the limited democratic system that has provided it with so many benefits. But if Congress or regulators start promoting policies that Corporate America opposes, its lobbies will find some way to work with the GOP lawmakers that it is currently shunning. And it’s worth remembering that business lobbying organizations have worried about their collective clout after the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision empowered a smaller cadre of ideological billionaires to funnel vast sums into various “dark money” organizations. Yet the mainstream business organizations launched largely successful campaigns after 2010 to prevent the nomination as GOP candidates of unelectable Tea Party kooks.

The business establishment did not initially support Trump in 2016. And in both 2016 and 2020, most business money went to the Democratic presidential candidates. For big business, Trump’s chaotic style, his opposition to free trade and immigration, and his failure to stem the pandemic were more than enough reasons to prefer Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. However, once Trump was in office and—rhetoric and Tweets aside—operated as a traditional conservative on taxation, deregulation and pro-business judges, business was more than happy to go along. So, no one should think that business is seriously thinking of abandoning the GOP for good.

If anything, recent events have shown that if the Republican Party is divided, it’s divided between a huge majority that supports the likes of Trump and Greene and a tiny minority who want to distance themselves from the events of January 6. Even after they reassembled to certify the presidential election after hiding from the right-wing mob on January 6, a majority of congressional Republicans voted to challenge the legitimacy of Biden’s election.

Only five Republican senators voted with all Democrats to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s resolution to dismiss the Trump impeachment trial, and only 11 House Republicans voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments despite her very public death threats against other members of the House. And for that handful of Republicans that establishment media have lauded for their courage, they have mainly drawn censure and condemnation from their state and local Republican parties.

As long as the U.S. has a two-party system, the two “big tent” parties will gather a wide span of opinion under their pro-capitalist umbrellas. Last year, self-identified democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made news when she said that if the U.S. had a parliamentary system, she and the neoliberal centrist Joe Biden wouldn’t be in the same party. The same could be said about the Right side of the political spectrum. In Britain, Trumpist politics reside(d) in the UK Independence and Brexit parties before being reabsorbed to the mainline Conservative (Tory) Party. The U.S., “populist” and establishment conservative politics remain inside the GOP.

Even as capital’s agenda drives both parties, capital itself doesn’t have enough support to motivate voters to support conservatives in election after election. So the modern Republican Party has relied on millions of (mostly) white, and mostly middle-class, voters to continue to vote for its candidates. It began with the 1964 presidential campaign where Sen. Barry Goldwater appealed for votes by explicitly opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It progressed through the repeated embrace of anti-abortion and anti-LGBT policies to lock down the largest sector of Republican voters, conservative Christian evangelicals. In many ways, the expansion of the GOP big tent to include elements of the far right and QAnon fantasists—whose world view overlaps with much of the evangelical world view—is a more extreme version of the same.

In an atmosphere of continued political polarization and of GOP expectation that it will regain the congressional majority in 2022, there is no incentive for Republican politicians or operatives to drive a wedge through its ranks. The farther the Washington elite moves on from January 6 and the focus of politics shifts to the Democrats’ agenda, the more likely will be the Republicans’ successes in revving up their supporters in opposition to the Democrats. Add that to a political structure that is systematically biased in favor of white, rural/exurb and conservative representation. So anyone who writes an obituary for the Republican Party today may have to eat their words tomorrow.